A worker at Ai Rose Spa stands in the hallway during a surprise inspection by the Department of Public Health, in San Francisco, CA, Friday, March 14, 2014.
Inspectors with the San Francisco Department of Public Health, working in tandem with the SFPD's Special Victims Unit and SFFD building inspectors, conducted unannounced inspections of a select group of massage parlors in San Francisco looking for violations, sexual misconduct and evidence of human trafficking.

Demand is half of the human trafficking equation. If there were no purchasers for commercial sex or illegal labor, there wouldn't be any victims. Yet, those who purchase other people are often under-prosecuted, underpublicized, and under-studied: We hear far more about the victims of human trafficking than we hear about the people who buy them.

This problem is slowly changing in the Bay Area. As awareness around human trafficking develops, there's been an interesting split in terms of how different aspects of it are handled. With labor trafficking, law enforcement has had little hesitation in going after perpetrators. "There's no conflict around labor trafficking, and there's no conflict around (punishment) for people who are buying sex from those who are underage," said Ellyn Bell, executive director of the SAGE (Standing Against Global Exploitation) project in San Francisco.

But historically, local authorities - especially in San Francisco - have been slow to go after "johns." That's partly a matter of the Bay Area's freewheeling cultural mind-set around sex work, and partly a result of lobbying from sex worker rights organizations, who view a crackdown as potentially harming their members. In general, the status quo has been to treat solicitation as a minor offense.

"When it comes to aggressive prosecutions and trying to put people in jail for a year, we focus on pimping and pandering," said Alex Bastian, spokesman for the San Francisco district attorney's office. "It's a matter of resources."

The SAGE project runs the First Offender Prostitution Program, commonly known as "john school," a court diversion program that has become a national model. The school has reduced recidivism among those caught soliciting for prostitution, but there's been an acknowledgment that the city has to do more.

Recently, San Francisco won a grant from Demand Abolition, an organization leading a multiyear national push to reduce demand for the illegal commercial sex industry. The grant is paying for the salary of a facilitator between different city departments and nonprofits to work on a coordinated strategy around demand - one that doesn't just involve, say, street sweeps of johns.

"That's important because when you're only doing street operations, you're not getting a wide demographic for who's purchasing sex," Bell said. "And most importantly, you're not necessarily getting the most dangerous offenders, which is who we're worried about."

It's encouraging to see that San Francisco is coming to grips with the need to focus on this part of the problem. Their growing efforts stand in contrast with Alameda County, where officials have taken a different approach.

"We've been very aggressive," said Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O'Malley. "It's my belief that since we have Proposition 35 (which stiffened punishments for human traffickers), local jurisdictions should be focusing on demand now."

O'Malley's office has prosecuted 46 percent of the state's human trafficking cases in the last several years and has an 82 percent conviction rate. She doesn't let the unduly weak solicitation laws stop her, either: "When the law doesn't give us the tools to go after someone who's buying underage sex, we've charged kidnapping, different kinds of sexual assault, kidnapping for sex."

The Oakland Police Department has stepped up its efforts, too. It recently launched a new initiative to alert the public about those who have been charged with demand-related offenses. On its website ( http://bit.ly/1qsDpvc), there's a gallery of mug shots that rotates every two weeks.

Both approaches represent an improvement over the status quo, since fighting the demand for victims is key to the battle against human trafficking.